The Montessori Education Method and the Wish to Understand

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire talks about what he calls the banking method of education. In the banking technique the student is noticed as an object in which the teacher have to location information. The student has no responsibility for cognition of any sort the student should simply memorize or internalize what the teacher tells him or her. Paulo Freire was incredibly a lot opposed to the banking program. He argued that the banking technique is a technique of manage and not a technique meant to successfully educate. In the banking system the teacher is meant to mold and alter the behavior of the students, sometimes in a way that pretty much resembles a fight. The teacher tries to force facts down the student’s throat that the student could not think or care about.

This course of action sooner or later leads most students to dislike school. It also leads them to create a resistance and a unfavorable attitude towards mastering in basic, to the point exactly where most people won’t seek know-how unless it is expected for a grade in a class. Torstar believed that the only way to have a real education, in which the students engage in cognition, was to alter from the banking method into what he defined as dilemma-posing education. Freire described how a problem-posing educational program could work in Pedagogy of the Oppressed by saying, “Students, as they are increasingly posed with complications relating to themselves in the globe and with the planet, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. Due to the fact they apprehend the challenge as interrelated to other troubles within a total context not as a theoretical question, the resulting comprehension tends to be increasingly important and as a result continually much less alienated”(81). The educational method developed by the Italian doctor and educator Maria Montessori presents a tested and successful kind of issue-posing education that leads its students to raise their wish to study as opposed to inhibiting it.

Freire presents two key complications with the banking idea. The initially one is that in the banking notion a student is not required to be cognitively active. The student is meant to merely memorize and repeat information and facts, not to understand it. This inhibits the students’ creativity, destroys their interest in the topic, and transforms them into passive learners who don’t realize or believe what they are being taught but accept and repeat it due to the fact they have no other solution. The second and a lot more dramatic consequence of the banking idea is that it gives an huge power to those who pick what is getting taught to oppress those who are obliged to discover it and accept it. Freire explains that the troubles lies in that the teacher holds all the keys, has all the answers and does all the thinking. The Montessori approach to education does the precise opposite. It tends to make students do all the thinking and trouble solving so that they arrive at their own conclusions. The teachers merely help guide the student, but they do not inform the student what is correct or false or how a challenge can be solved.

In the Montessori program, even if a student finds a way to solve a problem that is slower or much less successful than a standard mechanical way of solving the issue, the teacher will not intervene with the student’s approach mainly because this way the student learns to uncover solutions by himself or herself and to believe of inventive techniques to operate on various challenges.

The educational system in the United States, specially from grade school to the finish of higher college, is just about identical to the banking method to education that Freire described. Throughout high college most of what students do is sit in a class and take notes. They are then graded on how properly they complete homework and projects and finally they are tested to show that they can reproduce or use the understanding which was taught. Most of the time the students are only receptors of facts and they take no part in the creation of information. One more way in which the U.S. education system is practically identical to the banking program of education is the grading technique. The grades of students mostly reflect how much they comply with the teacher’s ideas and how a lot they are prepared to stick to directions. Grades reflect submission to authority and the willingness to do what is told a lot more than they reflect one’s intelligence, interest in the class, or understanding of the material that is becoming taught. For instance, in a government class in the United States a student who does not agree that a representative democracy is superior to any other form of government will do worse than a student who merely accepts that a representative democracy is much better than a direct democracy, socialism, communism, or a different form of social method. The U.S. education technique rewards these who agree with what is getting taught and punishes those who do not.

Additionally, it discourages students from questioning and undertaking any thinking of their personal. Due to the fact of the repetitive and insipid nature of our education program, most students dislike high college, and if they do properly on their work, it is merely for the objective of obtaining a grade as opposed to studying or exploring a new notion.

The Montessori Method advocates youngster based teaching, letting the students take control of their own education. In E.M Standing’s The Montessori Revolution in Education, Standing says that the Montessori Approach “is a process primarily based on the principle of freedom in a ready atmosphere”(5). Research accomplished on two groups of students of the ages of 6 and 12 comparing these who find out in a Montessori to these who understand in a common school atmosphere show that in spite of the Montessori system getting no grading technique and no obligatory function load, it does as properly as the normal method in each English and social sciences but Montessori students do substantially improved in mathematics, sciences, and problem solving. The Montessori method allows for students to be in a position to explore their interests and curiosity freely. Because of this the Montessori system pushes students toward the active pursuit of information for pleasure, meaning that students will want to find out and will uncover out about points that interest them simply since it is enjoyable to do so.
Maria Montessori started to create what is now identified as the Montessori System of education in the early twentieth century.

The Montessori Method focuses on the relations among the child, the adult, and the atmosphere. The kid is seen as an person in improvement. The Montessori technique has an implied notion of letting the kid be what the kid would naturally be. Montessori believed the typical education method causes young children to shed many childish traits, some of which are deemed to be virtues. In Loeffler’s Montessori in Contemporary American Culture, Loeffler states that “amongst the traits that disappear are not only untidiness, disobedience, sloth, greed, egoism, quarrelsomeness, and instability, but also the so-called ‘creative imagination’, delight in stories, attachment to people, play, submissiveness and so forth”. Due to the fact of this perceived loss of the youngster, the Montessori system operates to enable a kid to naturally develop self-confidence as nicely as the capability and willingness to actively seek knowledge and find one of a kind options to issues by pondering creatively. An additional significant difference in how kids find out in the Montessori program is that in the Montessori system a kid has no defined time slot in which to perform a activity. As an alternative the child is permitted to execute a task for as extended as he wants. This leads young children to have a far better capacity to concentrate and concentrate on a single process for an extended period of time than children have in the typical education system.

The role which the adult or teacher has in the Montessori technique marks a further fundamental distinction between the Montessori s Method and the normal education method. With the Montessori Strategy the adult is not meant to constantly teach and order the student. The adult’s job is to guide the kid so that the youngster will continue to pursue his curiosities and create his or her own notions of what is true, appropriate, and correct. Montessori describes the youngster as an individual in intense, constant modify. From observation Montessori concluded that if permitted to create by himself, a youngster would generally discover equilibrium with his environment, meaning he would learn not to mistreat others, for instance, and to interact positively with his peers. This is vital since it leads to one particular of the Montessori Method’s most deep-seated ideas, which is that adults should really not let their presence be felt by the youngsters. This indicates that despite the fact that an adult is in the atmosphere with the students, the adult does not necessarily interact with the students unless the students ask the adult a question or request aid. Additionally, the adult need to make it so that the students do not feel like they are getting observed or judged in any way. The adult can make suggestions to the children, but by no means orders them or tells them what to do or how to do it. The adult need to not be felt as an authority figure, but rather pretty much as yet another peer of the young children.